Request for Information - Membership Management and Social Networking

In order to better serve our members better, the Agile Alliance board figures we need to know more about them, and generally provide people with a smooth experience as members. We also want to help our members connect with each other and support each other (the fashionable term for which is now “social networking”).

Our current web site doesn’t do enough for those purposes, so we’ve decided to invest in improvements. We’ve written up our current ideas of our requirements, in two parts)

There are two ways you can help.

First, whether or not you are a member, we’d appreciate feedback on the above list of features. Maybe there are some we haven’t thought of, and maybe there are items you’d appreciate our adding.

Second, you can get us in touch with vendors or open source projects which you think would be a good fit for the above purposes.

Our reasoning at the moment is that we would prefer SaaS offerings, because the job of the Agile Alliance board is to think up ways to support the agile community, not to host or develop Web sites. And we think theses services – interacting with members and helping them connect with each other – are basic enough that it’s likely there’s a better implementation out there than we could get by funding a new project or spending time tinkering with servers. (We’re open to changing our minds about that.)

We definitely wish to retain the possibility to develop further services on top of such a platform. We are also aware of the possibility of calling on volunteers: after all, we serve a community of top-notch software professionals. The chicken-and-egg issue is that, to effectively organize those of our members who’d like to serve as volunteers, we first need to reach out to our members in a more effective way!